Dan Patrick

Texas House Speaker Joe Straus says the State of Texas should not have to spend as much on border security in the next budget because incoming President Donald Trump says that’s his top priority. The Speaker would like to see Washington pick up a bigger part of the bill.

In 2015, state lawmakers approved more than $750 million to fund the Texas Department of Public Safety’s border security operation in the Rio Grande Valley. Public Safety is now asking for more than a billion state dollars to expand the state’s border efforts.

One of the first pieces of legislation filed ahead of the January session is a bill that would punish city and county law enforcement agencies for policies that direct officers not to ask questions about a person’s immigration status.

They’re called sanctuary cities, the name derived from state lawmakers’ perception that these metropolitan police departments provide sanctuary to immigrants and families who may be in the country illegally.

On Friday Texas and 12 other states asked a federal judge to block the Obama administration’s order to school districts to allow transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice.

The Obama administration order followed a Justice Department lawsuit against North Carolina which passed a law requiring people in the state to use only the public bathroom that matched their gender at birth.